Does anyone want to try and make a silk purse out of a sows ear?

Roman and Dave were kind enough to offer their suggestions for improving an image I posted elsewhere in NWP, which got me thinking that no one has posted a Post Processing Challenge for the group since James did it in April. Although I have never participated, always I thought they were fun to watch. Now I think I’d like to actually participate for a change.

I’m willing to step up be the guinea pig if anyone is interested. I picked this particular image not for its great composition, but because of the great difficulty I had getting the shot coupled with the difficulty I have had in trying to process it.

Here is the set-up:

I took this shot from the deck of a cruise ship as we rounded Cape Horn. Skies were overcast and it was foggy, the ship was rocking slightly and, of course, there was the engine vibration to deal with as well. To make matters worse, at the time, Venezuela and Columbia were rattling sabers and security was tight throughout South America. As a result, Chilean gunboats made sure our Captain kept a respectful distance from the Cape. A 50-200mm zoom was the longest lens I had available.

Below is a copy of a raw file exported to a low-res jpeg.




Exif: Olympus E-510, 50-200mm @ 200mm f/4.5, ISO 200, WB 5700K


The second is a low-res copy of my post processing efforts.



I can email the 9.5MB RAW file if anyone wants it.

Any takers?

Jim

PM sent. DAve

Would like a RAW shot as well.

me too... My email address is on my public profile here at NWP.

I just as well be the first to post what I ended up with, I didn't know what the colors were, pumped up the saturation a bit, put a bit of blue in the water, I assumed you wanted to get a bit closer, so cropped in a bit. I hope I can remember how to post the pic here. LOL DAve

Here is my version. I opened in ACR - balanced the exposure and played with the White Balance. I then saved to Photoshop, converted to CMYK, played with curves a little, converted to RGB, played with curves a little, saved to JPG, straightened the shoreline, and sharpened. I was not sure how green it was, so tried to end up with something not too saturated green.






I hope you like it.

Dave

Thanks for helping me with this image Dave & Dave!

(Gee, we’ve got almost as many Daves around here as we do Jims.)

As a neophyte, observing how more experienced and capable photographers handle an image is a great learning tool.

Besides the overcast skies and fog present in the shot, I think it was probably at least 1 f/stop under exposed. That all conspired to rob the shot of color, sharpness, and detail. It looks like both daveman and dave_lines adjusted the color curves, increased the color saturation, and sharpened the image. All of which improved the shot dramatically. dave_lines’ tighter crop offers a completely different perspective, but points out that shooting from higher up would have been a better perspective. The crop leaves me wanting to see the rest of the lighthouse.

After seeing what you guys did with it, I went back and took a couple more tries. The biggest difference between Versions 2 & 4 is the amount of color saturation added and a slightly tighter crop in Version 4. I was surprised to see that increasing the saturation past a certain point seems to negatively affect the perceived sharpness (?).

Version 3:




Version 4:



Thanks!

Jim

Well....here is my entry to the challenge....
Your origonal:


Here is my edit:


Hope it meets your approval.

Roman

Hi Roman:

I like it. Actually, I liked all of three of the upgrades you guys made to the original. It is really helpful to me to see what you more experienced photographers did with the original. It will help me in the future.

After seeing your approaches, I am going back over the whole batch of shots I took that morning and am reworking many of them. That will move a lot of them into the keeper category.

Thanks!

Jim